by Norah Wilson
Jason.
Alex and Brooke were right! He wanted her to survive. To get herself out of this hell. Despite what she’d done…her baby brother wanted her to live.
But what if it was too late?
The flames were almost upon her now, and she felt the agony from the collar leap to a whole new level. It was…indescribable. Once again, the primal scream started to build in her…
“Come back to us!” Alex called from outside, and her voice was enough to drag Maryanne back from the abyss of pain.
She had to get out, and she had to do it soon. The shed was completely engulfed now. No one could help her. Not Alex, not Brooke. Soon the heat would drive them even further back.
More copper. That’s what she needed. She turned her head to the left and there it was, down by her feet! The rest of the copper tools. Concentrating every last shred of her determination, she managed to move her leg to the left. Her foot contacted the copper and she almost sobbed with relief. Somehow, the collar didn’t burn quite so viciously. Now that she’d made contact, she found she had enough mobility to draw up her leg, dragging the tools close enough to snag them with her hand.
Something else toppled in the room, causing a shower of sparks to rain down on her. And the sound of the fire! It roared, a monster alive and calling out its hunger.
Holding the copper tightly in her hand, she rolled onto her belly and started crawling toward the door. Thrusting the copper out and pulling herself toward, she inched her way along.
Could she really do this? Could she crawl out of hell?
As if to add weight to the thought, as if hell wanted her still, a timber fell from above. A beam of some sort; it wouldn’t be long till the whole roof collapsed.
Me-anne!
I’m trying, Jason. I’m coming. Help me, Jason. Help me…to survive this. To get through this. I…I want out…I want to live.
She surged forward again.
Brooke and Alex were standing as close as they could, their arms reaching toward her, encouraging her. Then she saw Bryce standing there too. Bryce, the hunter. Yet, he was crying—she was sure of it. As she looked out through the wavering heat, Maryanne could almost swear they all were crying. Another burning beam fell, and Maryanne cried out as the nail-spiked wood sailed through her foot. Not a primal cry, but a cry nonetheless, even if she was the only one who could hear it.
“Keep coming!” Alex called.
“Come on, Maryanne, a little farther. If you can get a little farther, we can help you.”
Maryanne dug in again, using the copper pieces almost like ice picks. Dig in, pull. Dig in, pull.
“That’s it! That’s it! Grab my hand!” Brooke called.
Maryanne looked up to see Brooke’s outstretched arm just on the other side of the flames. “Come on, Maryanne! Come back to us…oh God, please! I just can’t lose you. You…you’re my sister!”
She was Jason’s sister too.
With one final press of energy, Maryanne reached out and dug the copper in, then pulled herself to it again. She reached beyond the flames. And then she felt a hand in hers. Then another, as both of her friends pulled her out.
They all collapsed in the snow as soon as they’d moved a safe distance from the shed. Now that she was out of the flames, Maryanne’s cast began to lose its reddish tinge. Now that the desperate drive to get out of the flames was over, Maryanne couldn’t have moved a limb if she’d needed to. She was back to being immobilized, thanks to the damned collar. The collar that still burned.
“The collar,” Brooke said. “We have to get it off her.”
Bryce stepped forward. “Here. Let me do it.”
Alex rounded on him. “Get away from her!”
“I’ve got the key. I know how it closes.” Without waiting for a response, he knelt in the snow at her side and grasped the collar, only to drop it with a yelp.
“No fun, is it?” Alex said.
Bryce said nothing as he dug gloves out of his pocket. In a matter of seconds, he’d turned the key in the collar’s clasp and pulled it free. Then he flung it away. It made a sizzling sound as it settled in the fresh snow.
Of course, as soon as she was free of the iron collar, Maryanne started to sink into the snow and frozen earth. The girls, already anticipating what would happen, slid their hands under her torso. Maryanne put a caster hand to her throat. It pained incredibly. Her original back in the attic wept, both with relief and with the pain she felt there. Iron cut. Iron bruised. And iron burned like hell. She could feel the blisters growing.
“I’m sorry,” Bryce sobbed. “Maryanne, I…I’m so sorry. I…I didn’t mean—”
“Yeah, you did,” Brooke said. “You meant to, you prick.”
“Not the fire!” Bryce protested. “That was an accident. Completely an accident.”
“Right. That’s why you tried to stop us from getting her out. That’s why you wanted us to let the Heller burn.”
“That…that was rage. Craziness! I saw you, Brooke, and I thought of Seth and how he died. Why he died.” He swallowed. “You have to believe me. I didn’t intend to start that fire.”
Though she couldn’t speak, Maryanne knew the truth. The space heater falling over had been an accident. But why had he left her there, collared and helpless in the first place? What had he been planning to do to her? As if sensing her thoughts, he answered her question.
“I wasn’t going to do anything to her. I…I wanted pictures, that’s all. Just some pictures so people would believe me.”
“Where’s the camera now, Bryce?” Alex asked.
“I was on my way up to the house to get it when you guys arrived. All I wanted was one picture. If I had that proof, I thought…I thought you’d leave us alone. I thought you’d all…just stop tormenting us!”
“Tormenting you?” Alex asked.
“Yes, dammit! Grampy, and Seth and—” He swallowed hard, choked up again, and hung his head. “Seth’s death. It was an accident, but…it was my accident. My fault. We fought in the stables, and then I left him there with those riled-up horses. I never thought…” He swallowed hard again. “You can’t imagine the grief. You can’t imagine the guilt. I blamed you—the Hellers. That…that was the only way I could handle it.”
Maryanne’s heart went out to him. She understood; she could imagine the grief. Oh, how she understood.
She reached out and touched Bryce’s leg. He whipped his head around to look at her, but he seemed to wilt with relief.
She couldn’t talk to him. Couldn’t say anything that a non-caster would hear. She squeezed his leg to let him know it was all right. Or at least, it was going to be all right. That sometimes surviving was all a person had to start with.
“Oh shit! You hear that?” Alex said.
“Sirens,” Brooke said.
Crap! Neighbors must have seen the smoke and called the fire department. Maryanne knew she was too weak to soar home. Not to mention it was broad daylight, and the snow had stopped.
“Let’s get her to the house,” Bryce commanded. He knelt and swept Maryanne up in his arms. Brooke and Alex took protective positions beside him as they raced to the Walker home. He carried her straight up the stairs and into his grandparents’ bedroom where he deposited her gently on the bed, only to see her form slip right through the covers into the mattress. Alex and Brooke reached out to grab her before she hit the steel springs in the box spring.
“Oh, crap, I forgot about that.”
“It’s okay. We’ll take care of her,” Alex said, effectively dismissing Bryce.
He hesitated in the doorway. “No one…no one knows about Seth’s accident,” he said. “About my role in it.”
“No one knows about us either,” Brooke sent him a meaningful glare. “And they won’t.”
Bryce nodded. “We all have our secrets, then.”
He ran down the stairs and the front door banged shut behind him as he went to deal with the firefighters.
Chapter 40
; Waiting for Nightfall
Brooke
Brooke looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and grimaced.
She’d left Maryanne for a few minutes, just long enough to sluice the soot off her skin and shampoo the smoke out of her hair. Now that her skin was clean, she could see the burn on her forehead and several nasty ones on the back of her right hand. She dug under the vanity, found a first aid kit, and carefully dabbed some antibiotic ointment on each hand.
Truthfully, all of the skin on the front of her body felt stretched tight, like she had a bad sunburn. They’d gotten way too close to that fire. They could all have been seriously hurt if a wall had come down. The thought made her stomach lurch again.
But they’d done it. They’d gotten Maryanne free. Or rather, Maryanne had gotten herself free.
And Maryanne was now alone in a room with the man who’d almost killed her.
Brooke reached for the t-shirt and pajama pants Bryce had given her to wear while her own smoky, sooty clothes were going through the wash. Lord only knew how her coat would come out. She was pretty sure the designer had never intended it to be washed, let alone tumbled dry. It beat going back to Harvell House reeking of wood smoke, though. Even Alex had worn a different coat home—one of Bryce’s old ones from years ago. It was miles too big, but if she walked in wearing that pea coat of hers all soot-blackened and reeking of smoke, someone would jump on her for sure, demanding to know what in hell had happened to her. This way, hopefully she could scuttle straight to their room, gather up the first aid kit, and race to the attic sooner rather than later.
Brooke shook out the old t-shirt and froze when she saw the band name emblazoned across the front. The Cancer Bats. They’d been one of Seth’s favorite bands. And this was one of his favorite shirts. He’d bought it at a concert in Moncton.
Suddenly, she wanted to cry. Except there was no time for that. Maryanne needed her.
She yanked the t-shirt on over her head and flipped her long hair out. Then she hauled the pajama pants on, rolled the cuffs up three or four times, and headed back to Maryanne.
She heard Bryce’s voice as she approached the bedroom and was reassured by his tone. He was still falling all over himself, apologizing. He’d had to go back out again right after carrying Maryanne inside, leaving Alex and Brooke to deal with her while he dealt with the fire trucks. Starting with winching Brooke’s car out of the mouth of the drive with his father’s tractor and clearing the snow away so the fire truck could get in. And after all that, the fire chief had decided to let the fire burn out, since the old shed was already so far gone and the blaze was in no danger of spreading. Brooke knew it had killed Bryce to stand out there with the firemen while the fire finished its work.
Brooke was almost to the bedroom door when a thought occurred to her. As long as Bryce was so fully preoccupied in there, she might as well have a look around. Starting with his bedroom.
She crept back down the hall past Seth’s room to what had to be Bryce’s. The door was open. With a glance down the hall, she slipped inside.
Unlike Seth’s bedroom, there were no sports trophies on display. Instead of sports paraphernalia on his shelves, Bryce had books. She leaned in for a closer look. Everything from comic books and graphic novels to classics. The pictures on his wall were nature shots, with the exception of a picture of Bobby Orr, his one nod to sports. He’d been a defenseman, hadn’t he? Same as Bryce?
She turned her attention to his desk, which was strewn with what looked like drawings. Her money was on comic book superheroes, judging by his reading material. Or maybe geometry homework, she thought as she moved closer. She turned the top paper around to get a better look. Huh. It was clearly a picture of an arrow. Her gaze then fell to the meticulous notes at the foot of the page, and she dropped the paper.
Shit! This was no normal arrow. It called for iron. Both the shaft and the head. It was a freaking Heller torture device! It had to be. Brooke thought of how that wicked arrow would feel embedded in her cast and shuddered.
Something caught her eye several feet to the right, near the end of the desk. Something lay there under a discarded towel. Brooke knew she should get the hell out of this room, but she had to know what was under there. With a trembling hand, she lifted the towel. And oh, God, this was even worse than the killing arrow! It was a collar, much like the one Bryce had locked Maryanne down with, but this one…Brooke shuddered. This one was equipped with spikes—on the inside.
That bastard! He’d lain on that bed, devising instruments with which to torture and kill casters. If he’d used that collar on Maryanne instead of the smooth one, would she have survived?
No. The answer came immediately. She’d have been too out of her mind with pain. They never could have reached her, reasoned with her, made her see that Jason was on her side.
Brooke suddenly realized that she couldn’t hear Bryce’s voice anymore. She dropped the towel back over the torture collar and scooted to the door. She took a quick look around the door frame and saw that the hall was empty. Then Bryce’s voice started up once more. Thank goodness. Heart pounding, she started back down the hall again. For the second time, she was about to walk into the room when Bryce’s words stopped her.
“So, I guess I should tell you about what happened to Seth and why I blamed you guys.” There was a pause and Brooke held her breath lest he hear her out in the hall. “No, it’s not your fault, Maryanne.” Brooke blinked, then realized Maryanne must have made some gesture to suggest riding the horses. “Yeah, whatever you did changed those horses, spooked them beyond fixing, but you weren’t responsible for Seth’s death. I know that now. It was my fault. Only mine.”
Silence again for a moment
“He said he knew where to find the Hellers. Knew who they were. And he was getting the shotgun ready to go after them. I…I tried to stop him. Who was he—or my grandfather, for that matter—to say they should die? We argued. Oh, God, we struggled. He pushed me and I shoved him back, harder than I should have. He fell. The commotion—that’s what stirred the horses up. I walked away mad. When I finally came back, I found him there, trampled.
“I couldn’t face the fact that I’d killed my own brother, so I blamed the Hellers instead. If the horses hadn’t been traumatized, it wouldn’t have happened. If Brooke—yes, I realize now it was Brooke—hadn’t tormented Seth in the food court, it wouldn’t have happened. If he hadn’t been goaded, maybe he wouldn’t have hunted you. And if I hadn’t tried to stop him…” He cleared his throat. “It was easier to face myself in the mirror if I could blame someone else.”
Another pause, this one so long Brooke debated entering the room, but when he spoke again, she was glad she hadn’t.
“I told the girls this already. Well, not in so many words, but I told them the gist of it. What I didn’t tell them is why I was so sympathetic to the Hellers. Yeah, yeah, the cancer thing. The whole struggle for survival resonated with me, no question. But there was something else.”
Another pause.
Bryce laughed. Sort of. Maybe more like a sob than a laugh. “A Heller saved my life once. I was just a kid. Before I got sick, even. There’s this little pond up near the top of a mountain not too far out of town. Well, it’s a lake in the springtime. It’s not much more than a little pond in the summer, but the water was fairly high and cold at the time. I was out tramping the trails, pretending that I was a hunter like my grampy. When I came to the pond, I thought I’d go for a swim. I stripped down and jumped right in. Like a real mountain man or something.
“But the water was so cold, it wasn’t long before I couldn’t move. I was damn near paralyzed and sank like a rock! I must have gone hypothermic, because I knew how to swim. At least I could back then. I haven’t been in the water since.” Another pause. “Anyway, I got into trouble. I was going under, sucking water…drowning. I knew it. Knew I was gonna die. Then this black…thing…swooped down and lifted me up.
“It was a Heller, of course, but a
t the time I thought it was the devil. I thought I’d already drowned and the black devil was carrying me to hell. But it just put me down on the grass near my clothes. Rolled me on my side and waited while I puked up water, holding my head the whole time. That’s when I realized it was female. Its touch was…motherly.”
Connie! Brooke blinked back tears. Connie Harvell had saved Bryce Walker, the grandson of her enemy.
“The only one I ever told about it was my grandmother,” he continued. “She just hugged me and made me swear never to tell Grampy. Anyway, that’s why I couldn’t hate the Hellers like Grampy and Seth did. Oh, I pretended to want to be a hunter, but it was hard, you know? Feeling so conflicted all these years.”
Another shaky laugh from Bryce. “I’m kinda glad you can’t talk back. Otherwise, I might never have gotten that out.”
And that, Brooke decided, was as good a cue as any. She rounded the corner and strode into the room. “Got what out?”
Bryce scrambled to his feet. He’d been sitting beside Maryanne, who was perched in the same position Brooke had left her in, on the edge of the bed, the copper tools beneath her butt holding her up. This was Ira Walker’s room. That thought had made Brooke more than uneasy when they’d first carried Maryanne up the stairs. Strangely—okay, vindictively—when they’d smudged soot all over the old quilt on the hunter’s bed, she’d felt much better
Now, as Bryce leapt to his feet, Brooke saw Maryanne adjust her weight. She’d been leaning on him. “Sorry. I was just apologizing,” Bryce said. “Again.”
Brooke fixed him with a dark look. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and go find some copper so poor Maryanne can lie down and recuperate.”
“Oh, shit.” He looked stricken. “I never thought. I’ll go right now. I’m sure there’s some in the basement from when the wiring was redone. I can strip the copper from the old wires.”
